Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the…
Delicately unfurling as an introductory vocabulary lesson, one informed by the portraiture at the film’s core — that of the formidable Thi Hau Cao, a…
The decadent luxury and moral rot of extreme wealth; a location as isolated as it is idyllic; lithe young bodies glistening in sunlight; the churning…
In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The…
Credit where it’s due: Dane Komljen is one uncompromising director. After his debut feature, 2016’s All the Cities of the North, enjoyed widespread acclaim from…
Contrary to its name, the attention economy thrives not on attention, but on precisely that gray zone between awareness and unconsciousness which brings forth the…
Taking place within Argentina’s great depression in 2001, Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is an intriguing effort at blending various styles, themes,…
Writer/director Brandon Daley is juggling a couple of very disparate tones in his new film $POSITIONS, an absurdist comedy that gradually transforms into a white-knuckle…
A hero’s journey holds appeal not just to the outsiders who chronicle it, but also to the hero himself, for whom narration imparts structure and…
If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of…
“An ode to cinema” — an audacious claim with which to open one’s feature, but audacity courses through the work of Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah…
The world has changed a lot since The Collingswood Story pioneered Screenlife storytelling in 2002. Nickelback had the top single that year, mid-budget films still…
Setting one’s low-budget genre film in a single setting is a time-honored tradition, a money-saving maneuver that makes for a simple calling-card exercise but which…
What proves fascinating about horror beyond its jumps and scares is a creeping sense of unknowability, a sense which violates our morals as much as…
Much like two recent films by major Japanese horror auteurs — Takashi Shimizu’s Sana (2023) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) — South Korean filmmaker Kim…
If anyone can make a great Cancel Culture movie, it would have to be Takashi Miike, right? Sham is based on a true story, a…
Brock Bodell’s directorial debut, Hellcat, begins with a wounded and frantic woman, Lena (Dakota Gorman), waking up in a moving camper trailer. A drawling voice…
In a world completely in thrall to corporate IP and mega-budget computerized imperialist fantasies, we should be eternally grateful to festivals like Fantasia for platforming…
The shadow of Alex Honnold looms large. As the most famous rock climber in the world, and the undeniable face of the sport to those…
It all begins as a ghost story in Portuguese filmmaker João Rosas’ feature debut The Luminous Life. Said ghost is a nameless woman who, as…
As Terrestrial opens, we meet Allen (Jermaine Fowler), a successful sci-fi writer who is of late enjoying a massive career upswing as his work has…